By Matt Viser · The Washington Post (c) 2024
President Joe Biden faced mounting criticism Monday for his decision to issue a sweeping pardon of his son, with a number of Democrats expressing concern that it would undercut faith in the justice system and provide ammunition to President-elect Donald Trump’s efforts to remake it.
In the hours after Biden’s announcement, several Democrats said that while they understood his decision on a personal level to protect his son Hunter – who has lost a baby sister and an adult brother, suffered from addiction and faced relentless scrutiny because of his father’s position – they also worried about the broader signal the pardon sends, that the politically connected have rights not available to all Americans.
“As a father, I get it,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) wrote on social media on Monday. “But as someone who wants people to believe in public service again, it’s a setback.”
Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Arizona) also weighed in to criticize the president’s decision. “I respect President Joe Biden, but I think he got this one wrong,” he said. “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution. Hunter committed felonies, and was convicted by a jury of his peers.”
Biden, a president who has often said “no one is above the law,” was effectively shielding his son from the consequences of a jury’s decision to find him guilty, some Democrats noted. A man who takes public pride in “my word as a Biden,” he was reversing his oft-stated commitment not to pardon his son or commute his sentence.
Democrats’ concerns come against the backdrop of Trump’s promises to use the justice system to punish his perceived enemies and help his allies after he takes office Jan. 20. His picks for attorney general, Pam Bondi, and for FBI director, Kash Patel, have urged retribution against Trump’s political adversaries and critics.
Biden, in contrast, presents himself as a leader who embraces the norms of American democracy.
The controversy erupted after Biden signed a “full and unconditional” pardon Sunday for Hunter Biden, who was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.
The decision came in the waning days of Biden’s presidency, at a time when he faces few political ramifications. But while only a few Democrats were critical, their quick, sharp reaction signaled a newfound willingness by some in his party to publicly challenge his decisions.
Biden himself appeared to anticipate the criticism in his announcement Sunday night. “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” he wrote in a statement.
Biden announced the pardon shortly before leaving on a multiday trip to Africa, and he has ignored shouted questions about the pardon as he boarded Air Force One.
“Of course I support the pardon of my son,” first lady Jill Biden said Monday, responding to a shouted question while unveiling the holiday decor at the White House and speaking to National Guard families.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who had repeatedly said that Biden would not pardon his son, faced numerous questions on the flight during a briefing with reporters.
She declined to say whether the president discussed the decision with his son while they were together on Nantucket for the Thanksgiving holiday. “He wrestled with it. It was not an easy decision to make,” Jean-Pierre said.
Some in Biden’s circle have expressed fear that Trump would target Hunter Biden once he enters the White House, but Jean-Pierre declined to say whether the pardon would have been issued had Vice President Kamala Harris won last month. “I’m not going to get into the election,” she said. “I can’t speak to hypotheticals.”
She also brushed aside questions about Biden’s assertion that his son faced “selective prosecution,” and whether Biden himself bears any responsibility for a Justice Department that he now claims has allowed “raw politics” to infect the process.
“Two things can be true,” Jean-Pierre said. “The president does believe in the justice system and the Department of Justice. And he also believes that his son was singled out politically.”
Republicans quickly seized on the move, criticizing Biden for protecting a family member and for going back on his word. The pardon proves that Biden, not Trump, is weaponizing the justice system, they said.
Trump, in a social media post, said that his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win should also receive pardons. Calling the cases against them “an abuse and miscarriage of Justice,” he referred to the rioters from that day as “the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years.”
Trump has not made clear who among the group of 1,500-plus people charged with crimes related to that assault might receive pardons after he enters the Oval Office. His representatives have previously said he would weigh clemency for the rioters “on a case-by-case basis,” and a transition spokesman did not immediately respond to a question about who would be considered. During his campaign, Trump did not rule out pardoning members of extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Many of the Jan. 6 riot defendants have made it clear they believe that Trump will grant them clemency, celebrating his victory, preparing for pardons and in some cases seeking postponements of their criminal cases.
Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which spent years investigating Hunter Biden as part of an impeachment inquiry into the president, slammed Biden’s decision. “President Joe Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability,” Comer said. Comer’s investigation failed to turn up significant evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on Monday morning also criticized the pardon, pointing to the president’s assurances that he would not issue one.
“Trust in our justice system has been almost irreparably damaged by the Bidens and their use and abuse of it,” Johnson wrote. “Real reform cannot begin soon enough!”
It is the risk of playing into those arguments that concerns Democrats who are uneasy with Biden’s decision. Gov. Jared Polis (D-Colorado) said that while he understands the president’s desire to help his son, “this is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”
“Hunter brought the legal trouble he faced on himself, and one can sympathize with his struggles while also acknowledging that no one is above the law, not a President and not a President’s son,” Polis wrote on social media.
Biden was also defended by many Democrats. Former attorney general Eric Holder said the pardon was warranted because it was clear Hunter Biden would not have been prosecuted for such offenses if his father were not president, given how such crimes are typically handled.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) said that Republicans were being deeply hypocritical, since they forcefully defended Trump when he was charged with multiple felonies and convicted last May of falsifying records to cover up hush money payments to an adult film actress.
“If you defended the 34x felon, who committed sexual assault, stole national security documents, and tried running a coup on his country … you can sit out the Hunter Biden pardon discussion,” he wrote.
Before the pardon, some Democrats and progressives had criticized Biden for not using his powers of clemency more often.
Rachel E. Barkow and Mark Osler, two law professors, wrote an op-ed in September calling on Biden to improve what they called “his paltry record on clemency.” They noted that recent presidents have used the waning weeks of their tenures in the White House to issue sometimes sweeping or controversial grants of clemency – including Trump, who issued a volley of pardons and commutations to people with personal connections to him shortly before leaving the White House in 2021 – in urging Biden to do more.
So far, Biden’s administration had received more than 11,000 petitions for clemency, according to statistics released by the Justice Department. Those statistics, which were last updated in October, show that Biden had granted by that point 25 pardons and 132 commutations.
Biden still has nearly two months left in office, and it remains unclear how many more pardons and commutations he may grant. Trump pardoned 144 people and commuted an additional 94 sentences, including to allies and others who had ties to him or his associates.
Many of those clemency grants came after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, including in the days leading up to Biden’s inauguration in January 2021.
In a letter after the presidential election last month, dozens of members of Congress pleaded with Biden to “use your executive clemency power to reunite families, address long-standing injustices in our legal system, and set our nation on the path toward ending mass incarceration.”
They said Biden’s previous grants of clemency “demonstrates your understanding of its life-changing impact,” and asked him to “help broad classes of people and cases,” including people on death row and individuals “with unjustified sentencing disparities.”
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Meryl Kornfield, Kara Voght and Mark Berman contributed to this report.